The pfSense project is a free open source customized distribution of FreeBSD
tailored for use as a firewall and router entirely managed by an easy-to-use web
interface. This web interface is known as the web-based GUI configurator, or
WebGUI for short. No FreeBSD knowledge is required to deploy and use pfSense. In
fact, the majority of users have never used FreeBSD outside of pfSense. In
addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, pfSense
includes a long list of related features. The pfSense package system allows
further expandability without adding bloat and potential security
vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with
millions of downloads since its inception and hundreds of thousands of active
installations. It has been proven successful in countless installations ranging
from single computer protection in small home networks to thousands of network
devices in large corporations, universities and other organizations.

To download the latest version, see previous versions, or to upgrade follow the
guides located on the pfSense downloads page.

This project was founded in 2004 by Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich. Chris
contributed to m0n0wall for some time prior and found it to be a great solution.
Although thrilled with the project, many users longed for more capabilities than
those accommodated by a project strictly focused towards embedded devices with
their limited hardware resources. Enter pfSense. In 2004, there were numerous
embedded solutions with 64 MB RAM that couldn’t accommodate the desired feature
set of pfSense, thus pfSense expanded to work on more capable PC and server type
hardware.